The Power Of Words
by Proton Star
Summary: Giles lives in books and words, and knows they change through time. It doesn't mean he always agrees with the changes.


Title: The Power Of Words  
Author: Red Fiona  
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer  
Characters: Giles, Willow, Kennedy  
Rating: 12  
Warnings: Homophobic and other offensive language, canonical character death.

Notes: Written for queerfest 2013. Set after season 7, not comics compatible or compatible with season 5 of Angel.

Summary: Giles lives in books and words, and knows they change through time. It doesn't mean he always agrees with the changes.

* * *

Cleveland was a shock after Sunnydale, and Giles wasn't just talking about the weather. The city was so much bigger for a start. There were obvious advantages, it was easier to hide in the midst of a larger population and yet, at the same time, there were more eyes that might notice something amiss.

Giles had set himself up as a second hand bookseller, with a side line in old first editions. The clichés about California were true, they were far more forgiving of "strangeness", in this case Giles's occult items shop, than Giles had expected. Here in Cleveland, he'd chosen to be more circumspect. If anyone asked, those occult items that could be seen, mostly artefacts of protection for the shop, were bits of tat that he was selling to the gullible to tide his shop over.

He misses Sunnydale, which he never thought would happen. He supposes that he'd got used to the place, and he knew where he could find anything he needed.

Buffy and the others seemed to like Cleveland though, once they'd adjusted to the differences and the fact that they couldn't go back. London would always be there for Giles but Sunnydale was at the bottom of what had been officially explained away as a sinkhole.

There hadn't been enough time to mourn what was gone, and the people they'd lost. Maybe that had been for the best; Giles had no idea what he could say to Buffy or Xander. He had no idea what to say to himself come to that. He missed Anya, the way he imagined he'd miss his arm if it were chopped off. She was brusque, irretrievably money-orientated, horrifically poorly read for someone of her age and she was a brilliant resource on demonology, good company and the only person who could ever make Giles's shop run a profit. She would have known what to do with this battered copy of Tom Sawyer he was holding.

The chimes over the door rang as Willow and Kennedy came in.

"Hi Giles," that particular tone of 'hi' was always followed by a request for a favour. "It's Pride in a couple of weeks and we've just seen the rota for the shop, and we were wondering if you could, you know, maybe, switch someone round so we could go."

"I'll see what I can do. I'm not promising."

That got him a beaming smile from Willow, which guaranteed he'd manage to find a way somehow. "Thank you Giles."

Since the rota had been his idea, of course he'd been landed with the job of keeping it up to date, moving people round to accommodate each other's wishes. Of course it was impossible to keep everyone happy, but Giles liked to think he did a reasonable job. It meant that Buffy could have a real life now, and that made all the little problems worth it.

It also meant that he could get to work reforming the Watcher's Council, and this time it would be better. He'd see to it that it was. Gone would be the pointless, damaging rituals and he'd put something better in place, better for the girls, his own and the ones who would come after.

It was a difficult task. He had some contacts, people who'd been kicked out of the Council, and he was spending lots of time trying to remember who had been booted out for good reasons and who had merely been trying to effect changes that the Council didn't want. Those whose character he was sure of he had used to re-house and train the potential Slayers who had been activated by Willow's spell. Giles wanted those girls to have a minimal disruption to their lives, or as small as he could make it. Even with those Watchers he'd managed to dig up it wasn't enough, it wasn't anywhere near enough. They had one man training the three slayers in Southern Germany and having to cover the entire area by himself. Even using all his contacts, there were still thirty girls who they hadn't been able to send back home. These girls, who couldn't or wouldn't go home, all for perfectly good reasons, Giles understood the grounds for their inability, he'd housed them in an old factory that had been converted into a youth hostel using Watcher's Council money. It was the best cover that Giles could come up with at short notice.

The other advantage to this rota system was the rest of his putative Watchers, Willow, Xander, Robin, even Andrew, could have lives too. Giles took Willow as his example, she'd been able to go back to college and this time she'd get the degree her intelligence deserved. She was studying Computer Science again, this time with a minor in Queer Studies. It was an unusual combination. Willow fought so hard to be allowed to read that mixture, not against the Humanities department, who were all for it, but the against Computer Sciences department who were dead set against it. Willow's impassioned defence of her chosen topics had seen a rapprochement between her and her mother, as well as getting her on to the degree programme she wanted, so it was a win all round.

It had also had some unexpected knock-on effects.

The book shop was remarkably spacious. A customer had even got lost on the second floor. One of the Slayers found him, looking confused in the cookery section. So, if one of the Slayers, or the ever-growing army of junior Watchers had a particular interest, and found enough books, Giles would make a section for them. He'd left Andrew in charge of the film section, and thanks to Maria, they had a whole section on Latin American novels. So when Willow and Kennedy came up to him to ask him if he minded giving them a bookshelf for a new section, he said yes without a second thought. It was only after he'd cleared them some space on the first floor that he asked what kind of books they would be putting on the shelves.

"Oh, you know queer lit, that kind of thing," Willow said cheerfully. Giles knew he shouldn't wince, but he couldn't help it. He hoped Willow would understand, her Queer Studies class had to cover this surely, but would Kennedy know? Because what they thought of him mattered to him, Travers would have said it mattered too much, and yet he couldn't help himself, there was that tiny wince of fear that he couldn't control.

Because queer was the one thing you couldn't be when Giles was growing up. Even the more racist knuckle-draggers at his school got that no-one could help the colour of their skin, and there was an agreement that the scholarship boys couldn't help who their parents were, even if, by general opinion, they ought suffer their upbringing elsewhere. But queers were everyone's acceptable targets. So he wasn't, at school, or at least he didn't do anything about it.

He understood the reclaiming of words and all that, but for him it was too soon, and probably always would be. In his mind it was a word that was always followed by a punch at least.

Of course, if he says anything, he's being a fusty old British linguistic imperialist. Which might well be true but doesn't make him wrong. Words have a power; people who use magic knew that even more than most, and giving them a new use didn't wipe out the old. It's not anger he feels, he's too old and weary for that, but he wants someone to listen to him and see his point of view.

Or maybe he should accept this as the way of the world. The Earth spun, people changed, language evolved. The days had moved on from his youth, and that wasn't a bad thing. He had no doubt that Willow, Kennedy and who knows which other of his Slayers would have struggles ahead of them, beyond those associated with being Watchers, Slayers or witches, challenges that he couldn't even imagine, different from those he and his friends had faced, but he needed to believe that theirs was a better world.


End file.
